Prof.
Ashish Nandy, India's leading intellectual acknowledged as the founding
fathers of postcolonial studies has recently got a new 'identity'.
According to the Gujarat Police he is now an accused in a criminal
case supposedly for 'promoting enmity between different groups on
grounds of religion, race, place of birth and language.' Definitely
neither Prof Nandy nor many of his admirers would have ever imagined
in their wildest dreams that a day would arrive when he will face
prosecution for his writings. But as they rightly say it, in Gujarat
things happen bit differently.

According
to media reports the Ahmedabad police have admitted a petition filed
by an advocate belonging to National Council for Civil Liberties over
Professor Nandy's leader page article in the Times of India ( 8 th
January) 'Blame The Middle Class'. It need be added that this is the
same council which had filed a few petitions against social activist
and leader of Naramda Bachao Aandolan Medha Patekar on some frivolous
charges which were later dismissed by the court.

To put
it straight, the particular article had tried to analyse the election
results for the Gujarat assembly held in December 2007 which had once
again given a mandate to Mr Narendra Modi. The article in question
revolved around basically three points : One, it had tried to delineate
the plight of the Muslims who were condemned to live a second class
existence in the post 2002 phase. It had clearly stated that '..[G]ujarati
Muslims too are “adjusting” to their new station. Denied
justice and proper compensation, and as second-class citizens in their
home state, they have to depend on voluntary efforts and donor agencies.
The state’s refusal to provide relief has been partly met by
voluntary groups having fundamentalist sympathies. They supply aid
but insist that the beneficiaries give up Gujarati and take to Urdu,
adopt veil, and send their children to madrassas.'

Secondly,
apart from the plight of Muslims it had also explained the situation
in which the political formations who espouse the cause of secularism
find themselves today. And he was unsparing in his criticism of these
formations/individuals.For him :

'The secularist
dogma of many fighting the sangh parivar has not helped matters. Even
those who have benefited from secular lawyers and activists relate
to secular ideologies instrumentally. They neither understand them
nor respect them. The victims still derive solace from their religions
and, when under attack, they cling more passionately to faith. Indeed,
shallow ideologies of secularism have simultaneously broken the back
of Gandhism and discouraged the emergence of figures like Ali Shariatis,
Desmond Tutus and the Dalai Lama — persons who can give suffering
a new voice audible to the poor and the powerless and make a creative
intervention possible from within worldviews accessible to the people.'

Of course
the focus of its attention was on the 'state's urbane middle class'
which has remained 'mired in its inane versions of communalism and
parochialism'.
The article had concluded with the observation that :

'Recovering
Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has
found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a
new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus,
Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have
sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood,
for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and
coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of
the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the
media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times.
And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who,
at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist,
bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.'

While one
may agree to differ with Professor Nandy's observations on various
counts, still any concerned reader can see that it did not engage
itself in any rhetoric and tried to delineate the challenges which
lie ahead. Question naturally arises why did the state government
felt pertrubed over this article and decided to give a green signal
to its police department to admit the said petition by the council
and file a criminal case against him ?

At a general
level one can say that targetting of individuals and stigmatising
them in very many ways is part of the modus operandi of the Hindutva
brigade. And this particular case does not seem to be different. In
fact it is a politics that seeks to silence critique, and battles
for a notion of the past that is homogeneously Hindu.

Last six
year history of Gujarat is replete with many such examples where they
tried to silence all those voices who did not fall in line with their
agenda based on hate and exclusion. We have before us the examples
of the dansescue Sarabhai or for that matter social activist Nafisa
Ali or scholar-activist G.N. Devy who were targeted on different occasions.

In Prof
Nandy's case perhaps the powers that be did not like the manner in
which he tried to delineate the future prognosis of a movement like
RSS. He concludes :

'Events
like the desecration of Wali Gujarati’s grave have pushed one
of India’s culturally richest, most diverse, vernacular Islamic
traditions to the wall. Future generations will as gratefully acknowledge
the sangh parivar’s contribution to the growth of radical Islam
in India as this generation remembers with gratitude the handsome
contribution of Rajiv Gandhi and his cohorts to Sikh militancy.'

The criminal
case filed against Prof Ashish Nandy reminds one of the villification
campaigns which were organised during BJP led regime at centre.In
fact with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) assumption of power
at the centre in 1998 and its ongoing attempts to remake the educational
curriculum in its own chauvinistic image gaining momentum, intellectuals
and academic positions at odds with the Sangh Parivar’s view
of history came under attack under various pretexts. The BJP has pursued
a concerted effort to malign and delegitimise scholars and intellectuals
at odds with its view of India’s past. After the stalling of
the Indian Council of Historical Research-sponsored ‘Towards
Freedom’ project edited by professors Sumit Sarkar of University
of Delhi (DU) and KN Panikkar of JNU, the National Council of Educational
Research and Training (NCERT) went all-out to weed out the influence
of, in the words of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief KS Sudarshan,
“anti-Hindu Euro-Indians” from the curriculum. In 2001,
when the moves by NCERT were underway to delete passages from school
textbooks that allegedly ‘hurt’ the sentiments of this
religious sect or the other, a delegation of Arya Samajis met Murli
Manohar Joshi, the human resource development minister, and demanded
that Romila Thapar, the legendary historian along with historians
RS Sharma of DU and Arjun Dev of NCERT, be arrested. Not to be outdone,
Joshi had also reiterated time and again his pet thesis that ‘academic
terrorists’ are more dangerous than armed ones.

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